This year, Ms. Woolf’s farm will be forced to rely entirely on the ground wells it owns, pumping what they need to keep the existing crops healthy. But there is no way to know how much water is available underground — and with neighboring farmers doing the same, it is only a matter of time before the wells run dry.

“It’s like a bank account that is going to run out, and you don’t know when,” Ms. Woolf said, standing near her fields of garlic, where workers were laying rubber irrigation tubes under the murky cloudless skies.

I have absolutely no sympathy for this predicament. It could not be more directly or more blatantly self-inflicted. This is the direct result of their own choices, and has been clearly evident to every observer for years. You know, even records and monitoring started in 2009 would be useful now. Fuck ’em. Let them wonder how much water they have left in their aquifers. They have only themselves to blame for not knowing.

Something that I think is not widely known is that the Westlands Water District originally relied entirely on groundwater and that they jumped at the chance to join the CVP and get water diverted from the Trinity River in order to address significant declines in the levels of the groundwater. Pity that they used that water to expand their farming operations rather than to replenish the groundwater so that they had sustainable operations! And while Westlands complains about “environmental cutbacks”, for two decades, the sixties and the seventies, Reclamation diverted almost twice the amount of water from the Trinity River that was authorized in Clair Engle’s original legislation. So the biggest cutback has been the elimination of water that they were literally stealing in the first place. For more details read Dane Durham’s ‘How the Trinity Lost Its Water’ http://www.c-win.org/webfm_send/175